The second symposium of the RATIO priority program had place in the Center of Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) at the Bielefeld University on the 28th and 29th of May, 2019. In thas occasion, we hold an agenda designed to foster a high level of interaction among the different projects that form part of RATIO.

We had two high-calibre invited speakers. On the first day, Prof. Gerhard Brewka from the Lepizig University talked about Abstract Dialectical Frameworks and Their Generalizations. On the second day, Dr. Noam Slonim from IBM gave us an introduction to the Project Debater developed by IBM.

Furthermore, we welcomed two new projects that joined the priority program this year: the Open Argument Mining project and the Framework for Argument Mining and Evaluation (FAME) project. The former is led by Prof. Iryna Gurevych and Dr. Christian Stab from the Darmstadt University, and the later is led by Prof. Gerhard Heyer and Dr. Ringo Baumann from the Leipzig University and Dr. Gregor Wiedemann from the Hamburg University.

The symposium had a set of four workshops, each of which corresponded to the topics of the working groups formed with members from the different RATIO projects during the “unconference“ meeting in October last year. These groups are Representation of Arguments, Quality of Arguments, Benchmarking, and HCI Aspects of Argumentation. The workshops were led by the coordinators of the priority program and held on the first day of the symposium.

On the second day of the program, the 14 projects presented their progress on their own research questions by way of interactive poster sessions. It was a very successful event in which everybody could know, in a direct way, about the research going on in the other projects. Thus, a closer communication was established among the different research groups. On that day, the working groups presented their next steps for shared tasks as well as the common research questions with the other working groups. The working group presentations can be accessed Here. On that day, there was also room for discussion on the organization of further joint activities of the priority program.